When you can feel light and gay, then you'll be lovely as a holiday

Oh gawd.

Time to shake off all the fun and the frolics of the past fortnight, and head back to the benighted environs of the office...

Eeek!

At the delightful Rick Skye Liza Live! show on Friday, he (of course) touched upon Miss Minnelli's eternal debt/tribute to the one-and-only Kay Thompson. So what better way to cheer us all up on this Tacky Music Monday than with another of the Grande Dame's utterly sublime routines (here tutoring the gamine Audrey Hepburn) from Funny Face..?

Kay Thompson and Audrey Hepburn - On How to Be Lovely from Funny Face

On how to be lovely
(On how to be lovely)
You got to be happy
(You got to be happy)
When you can feel
light and gay
Then you'll be lovely
as a holiday.

On how to be charming
(On how to be charming)
You got to be merry
(You got to be merry)
If only to weave a spell
And you'll be lovely
As a carousel too.

I (I know you can) show how.
It's (it's all in the) know-how.
And (and once you know) oh how
The world looks good to you
As it should to you.

On how to be lovely
(On how to be lovely)
You got to be jolly
(You got to be jolly)
When you can be fancy-free
And flash a smile that
Folks come flocking to see.

You'll be as lovely
As can be.

Not just at the moment. Give me few more mugs of coffee...

Mash up of the day...

...Maria Callas vs Marni Nixon/Audrey Hepburn?

Tito Gobbi sings My Fair Lady

Who wins?

[Thanks to my erstwhile other half Madam Arcati for finding this!]

Hart to Hart

Today marks the 106th anniversary of the birth of Moss Hart, writer, director, and the virtuoso behind many a classic story; some of which became musicals beloved of the habitués of Dolores Delargo Towers.

Mr Hart was a strange and contradictory character. More or less an out-gay man in the theatrical world of the 1930s, he nevertheless married the glamorous fashionista and actress Kitty Carlisle (what gay man wouldn't?), and they had two children together.



It was for his writing genius, however, that he will be most remembered. Collaborating with George Kaufman he wrote The Man Who Came To Dinner (later a star vehicle for Bette Davis and the outrageously camp Monty Woolley). With Woolley's friend and lover Cole Porter (with whom Mr Hart spent a four and a half month luxury cruise in 1935!) he produced the musical Jubilee! (from which came such standards as Begin the Beguine and Just One Of Those Things). He collaborated with Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (no relation), Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin.

But his crowning glory was another collaboration, this time with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, on an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. In their hands it became one of the best-loved musicals of them all...

And so we laud the magnificence of Moss Hart through his opus My Fair Lady:

Wouldn't It Be Luvverly? (My Fair Lady)

My Fair Lady - Horse Race scene

I Could Have Danced All Night (My Fair Lady)

Moss Hart on IBDB